shows! shows! shows!

when i was in high school, i played a lot of shows in various bands. first, i played bass in a band called Spoont. we weren’t the best band, but we weren’t the worst either, and we attracted a small following made up of about 50 of our friends who would come see us wherever we played. i have held on to this part of my life pretty tightly over the years, because it was a pretty innocent time, filled with friends, idealized naivety, drama, teen angst, and all of that good shit. it was what some might refer to as the “salad days.” dictionary.com defines this as a “period of youthful inexperience.” that pretty much hits the nail on the head. i was also in a couple other bands around this period of time, Serpentina and the Bear And The Butterfly. while my life is very different now than it was then, i still have these bands and the shows we played and the friends we made very close to my heart.

when i went to college, school and my studies and geographical distance got in the way of playing music. through most of the time, i didn’t have any bands or really write any music, and had very little time to jam with anyone, and in general had a hard time meeting people with whom i felt a musical compatibility. i resigned myself to doing solo shows where i would just play bruce springsteen covers on my guitar while my friends would get wasted in front of me. those shows were a blast, but they hardly count as creative outlets. i don’ t think i realized what an impact this had on my mental health until i started seriously playing music again about 6 months ago. i have felt like a different person. the incredible relief and destress on my own mental state that having a creative outlet has had on me feels so huge that i don’t even know how i made it through college without a consistent one.

so now i am playing in three bands, and i am having a blast. one is called Voyage In Coma, and we played our first show friday night with Pygmy Lush, Pianos Become The Teeth, and Dogs Without Borders. The show was packed, with easily over 100 people there. it felt good, though very nervewracking, to be playing music i had created in front of people again. it was a sloppy set, rife with technical difficulties and what not, but you have to start somewhere, and i can tell that we are going to keep getting better and better. we sound like a combination of Small Brown Bike, Deftones, Mono, Hot Water Music, and Envy. Or something like that. As our drummer Billy would say, “it’s all punk.”

another band is called The Ambulars. I play guitar in this band as well as in Voyage In Coma. My friend Mikey plays guitar and sings, my friend Jen plays bass and sings, and my friend Joey plays drums. The idea for this band originally stemmed from Jen wanting to start an Alkaline Trio cover band before she moved away to Chicago in August for graduate school. Jen had always wanted to be in a band, and so we decided why not go the extra mile and write some of our own songs, and before we knew it, we were a real band with four original songs(with more on the way) and a set of awesome covers. I am so pumped to start playing shows with this band.

my other band is tentatively called Strange Earth. It’s with my dear friend Carni and my friend Henry Mesias. I am playing drums in this band and it is very exciting. I like us a lot, though we have had scheduling and time troubles, we are going to be getting ourselves off the ground very soon. i’ll have more on us later.

shows are still being booked for Voyage In Coma and The Ambulars, and i will let people know as they come along! i am very happy to be playing music again. it is a sort of glue that helps to hold my life together right now, in addition to other glues.

thanks for reading this edition of CONDITION DC. if you didn’t know, i get my blog name from a song by the legendary band Jawbreaker called “Condition: Oakland.” it’s a beautiful song, check it out if you don’t know it.